[Cover photo credit to Shervin Lainez]
New York City singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Miles Francis has announced their upcoming EP Good Man, and released a video for title track “Good Man”.
The EP is the result of “a project during which the artist experienced a complete unraveling of conditioning that helped them come out as non-binary”, and the songs on the EP are “nuanced explorations of masculinity and all its trappings, presented in a sound that’s joyfully unfettered”.
Francis explains the title track, which came from conversations with “progressive-minded” men who still had blind spots around issues like the #MeToo movement:
“‘Good Man’” is about a particular patriarchal phenomenon that I’ve grown increasingly mindful of in the men around me. It’s sung by a man who preaches progressive values, who identifies as ‘one of the good ones’ – yet he fails to recognize his perpetuation of patriarchal behavior in his own life. There are lots of outwardly ‘bad’ men out there – but it’s the ones who claim their ‘good’-ness that can be particularly troublesome and capable of causing real harm. The songs on my album follow someone wrestling with their true nature, and at the heart of that process is the question of what ‘being a man’ even means.”
Francis will also be playing a show at Brooklyn Bowl on November 13 with Afrobeat band Antibalas.
As an artist indelibly informed by New York City, Francis drew immense inspiration from their hometown and was involved in the founding of the collective Musicians United:
They explain how this experience contributed to their personal journey:
“At the start of the protests and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter last year, I realized the most direct way I could help was to get a drum and go out to marches and keep a beat for organizers. In the beginning the goal was to get involved with anti-racist work, but the experiences I had and the people I met through the Black Trans Lives Matter movement opened up my whole world. It gave me a new mirror to see myself in, and helped me to find my own queerness and nonbinaryness.
When I’m in my studio, it feels like being completely free of the outside world, free of gender, free of everything except me. I feel like I’m finally figuring out how to take that freedom beyond my musical expression and bring it into every aspect of my life. Now I want to share that feeling with everybody.”
